Lightning, blood and (more) dust

Though the monsoon is not here yet, the dust storms have started. Sometimes it rains too. In our new house (**recently, we moved to the faculty housing at the university) the cracks in the walls make the wind howl like a bad horror film. The other morning after a particularly bad storm, Sombir came to pick me up.

L: Are you tired? You look tired.

S: Yes. The storm last night was terrible. In the summer, I sleep outside on my roof and I woke up from my charpoy on the patio all wet. The rain would not stop. More than the rain, there was incredible lightning and thunder lighting up the sky. It was loud and close, like wedding fireworks, but more deadly.

(Ed.: If you ever saw people set off fireworks for weddings, you would know that is saying a lot.)

I brought my bed inside and went back to sleep. But the humidity and mosquitoes were horrible. As soon as the rain let up, I went back outside. But then the rain came again and again I was back in my house, waiting. The rain finally passed and I enjoyed a few more hours of sleep, though I wondered whether I would wake up dead from being hit by a lightning bolt. I didn’t have a good night sleep.

L: I guess you survived. Lucky.

S: I did, but not because of luck. One day, some years ago, my three uncles were riding in the back of a horse-drawn trolley. All at once a storm came and lightning and thunder was all around them. Suddenly there was one loud crack and two of my uncles looked in horror to find my eldest uncle dead. The lightning struck him in the head and went out through his toes. All of his blood was dried up, like dust. In India there is a myth that if you are the eldest in the family that you are more likely to be struck by lightning.

L: Yeegad.

S: I was finally able to doze off when I saw my older brother snoring on his charpoy across the rooftop. Surely the lightning would get him first.

Crisis at the cross-wires

Days are turning into weeks and months here. Zazie started school. We went to America. The heat is upon us. And I have realized that gully cricket is the closest I am going to get to modern dance in this place. So, just weeks and weeks and days.

There is a moment on my morning walk that I stop--every single time, mind you--and look up.

The Haryana mornings are so incredible. The space between fog and pollution is slim and the the light refraction of the two yields the most perfectly tangerine orange sunrise, a perfectly terrifying orange ball of gas and fire looking so coy, yet foreshadowing the terrorizing season to come. (Heat is spelled with a capital letter in our house and never spoken above a whisper.)

But that is not it.

In fact I stop because there is something I can't see, but can only hear. There is one moment in my morning walk where a hundred thousand bumblebees sing in unison, where everyone's radio is set to static, and where the white noise is blinding. It is the place where the north/southbound electrical wires cross and touch the east/westbound electrical wires. They hang heavy on each other, as if bearing the weight of the sound itself might make them topple. They look guilty.

Walking under these wires is like walking through a forcefield. The king of the Goths could make sparks come from his body. Radiant matter like dust particles settle on my neck and arms and legs and I wonder if I could make lasers come from my eyes. Just from looking, I reap all the wheat in one glance. The first time I thought it was a mosquito. But, no, in this one spot, there are no mosquitoes. There is nothing. No birds. No wind. Just corpses of wheat-slayers that came before. It is a black hole made with jumper cables and bobby pins.

But, the wires are also a place for resurrections, for magical, quasi-death-defying hyper-vitalism. Just beyond this point, every morning, there is in front of me on the dusty curb, one boy--who literally runs circles around me--who does hundreds of strenuous push-ups. He looks like he is made of jump rope. Bobbing up and down, he reaches to the sky between each rep and it looks like he is paying off some bad bet to the electricity gods; like an automaton, energy is his lifeblood.

He must have asked for something big, because the power has been cut for hours at a time. Hours that can be counted by tens. And he keeps doing these crazy push-ups. And though I know that when I get home I will have to throw out the milk from yesterday, I can literally see the current. It taunts and chides me. It is there. But it is not there. And I am trapped in a science fiction story written by a fourteen year old.

The truth is, they gave us a generator. A huge one. A private one. An orange one. Like the sunshine cutting through the pollution, our orange star is scary. In one minute, the carbon monoxide from it is equivalent to 100 cars. And its exhaust pipe points directly onto the security guard's chair.

In fact, after the first (and only) night we used it, I went outside to get the paper and the guard was slouching in his chair. And I thought, "Oh, God, we killed Ashok. The generator killed him." I prepared to go to the cross-wires and do push-ups. But then he shifted his body and I realized he was asleep. Since then it sits there cold, waiting.

But soon, the Heat. Will. Come. And though I know the current is buzzing overhead a few hundred meters away, it will fail us. And I will look for synonyms for swelter, though "hot" will be all I will be able to muster. And looking backwards and forwards, at the mosquitoes and the sun, playing electromagnetic hot potato, I wonder about all of these abandoned blackholes. This is my gigantic detail: When the heat comes, leave no victims or accomplices .

Bijli ki Rani (Queen of Lightning)

So walking through the market some boys say something to me in Hindi. I ask Somvir, our driver, what they said.

He looked uncomfortable and then slowly and carefully said, They said you were "more pretty."

Eve-teasing in India is idiosyncratic and flirtatious street sexual harassment. Here is an entire site devoted to cataloging Indian terms for women (They have a whole section devoted to singing flirts, "If you have been sung to and felt threatened/ 'harassed' or even amused--email us at....) Most Western women who come to India (and I assume most Indian women as well at some level) have to deal with it incessantly.

In India, flirting is complicated. To unpack Indian courtship--street side or drawing room style--requires a lot of background. The unrelenting images of aspirational repressed sexuality in Bollywood films coupled with the nearly complete physical separation of men and women and further coupled with maternal idolatry and paternal parochialism is all further complicated by rigidly internalized gender roles and expectations. Seriously, complicated.

So, when these Indian boys say something to me in the market square that amounts to the idea that I am more pretty, I wonder what is going on here. In On Flirtation, Adam Phillips write, "Flirting allows us the fascination of what is unconvincing. By making a game of uncertainty, of the need to be convinced, it always plays with, or rather flirts with, the idea of surprise." Now, I suspect these boys would be extremely surprised if their flirting amounted to anything. In fact, I believe they would be positively freaked out it they garnered any response beyond reproach.

However, the surprise goes both ways. A bit later, after consulting the Hindi-English dictionary three times, Somvir clarified to say that they said that I was a "lightening bolt of pretty." Okay, putting aside how annoying and occasionally stressful this stuff is, I have to say, what a great comment. If flirting is trying to control uncertainty, then the metaphor of lightning reveals how haphazard and imprecise the game is. (Also they don't realize all the ways that flirting with me really is like flirting with disaster; the space between electrifying and electrocuting is small, but important.) Woods tells us that, like Tantalus, the flirt is a little bit of a sado-masochist: the tantalized and the tortured. Opening up the space of possibility means that impossibility gets a seat at the table too. You have to acknowledge their tenacity: in the face of so much rejection, these guys still try and try and try.

***

So after all this Zazie asks what is going on.

L: Did you hear that? Mommy is more pretty.

Z: More pretty than me?

L: No way, you are as pretty as a princess.

Okay, I am kind of baiting her here, though only a little I think.

She immediately starts crying. Big tears.

L: Whats wrong?

Z: I just don't like princesses Mommy, really.

L: Well, what do you think is the prettiest thing in the whole entire world?

She pauses for a really long time, thinking....slowly she says: A nice, washed car.

L: Zazie you are prettier than a nice washed car.

It may be that the best compliments stem from those very idiosyncratic terms that we come up with for ourselves, somewhere between compliments and harassment, between lightning bolts and Lightning McQueen.

Invitations

Maybe I am just trying to stir up trouble, but our driver clearly does not want to invite us over to his house.

See, Usha has been to her driver's house at least three times, not including two visits to the Babaji with his mom and one playdate with his sister's kids. On this last visit, while at his house, my driver's mom came over and invited her to her house.

Part of the reason might be because I asked if he knew where we could get cow milk in Sonipat for Zazie. His response was coy to say the least: "Actually ma'am, my mother and brother bought one cow yesterday and..." And then, he stopped short. He didn't want to give the milk up. I could tell. But I pressed. I mean, at least for the kid. So now, on most days he brings us one liter of cow's milk. Except sometimes he doesn't. "We drank it all ma'am. So good."

Taunting me with the relative tastiness and preciousness of your cow's milk is one thing. But this is India, where we are party to unrelenting and occasionally hostile hospitality. I may take some of your cow's milk, but I still should get a freaking invitation.

A note:

Somvir,

What gives? I saw you buy five kilos of giant red carrots to make halwa, so I know your family knows how to party. Just invite us over. I won't let Zazie eat your two year old niece and I will even wear a bindi for your mom.

Signed,

Lacey Madam.

The truth is I am cozying up to his family because I feel like they are our best shot at getting an invitation to a village wedding. Every other night we hear the dhol (drums) playing and imagine the dancing and the yummy food. One time, the bharat (the groom's procession to the bride's house; basically three hours of nonstop dancing in the streets) went right by our house. Forlorn, we just mimed a few dance moves from behind the curtains while trying not to make eye contact with anyone on the street.

I sort of thought that ingratiating ourselves into the villager's lives would be easier.

At my driver's suggestion, I took up classic Indian "morning walks" around Sushant City, our colony. This means you greet the dawn on the pavement, usually in sandals with socks and matching track suit. For three weeks, I have been getting up before the sun and heading out (though sadly, not in the requisite uniform).

I have written before about how magical the Indian dawn is. The area is bustling with activity. I jog passed multi-passenger motorcycles, Southpoint or Bright Scholars or Apollo International lemon yellow school buses, and Haryanan ladies carrying gigantic bowls of buffalo dung (chula) on their head (they use it for fires and for fertilizer). The pre-dawn cricket games are wrapping up and children are dragging buckets of water home.

I think I am making some headway.Two five year olds running in flip flops passed me twice this morning. Then the milkman circled around me on his bicycle saying, two rounds madam? Or one round? Finished when? How much milk? Then I saw Ashleigh and Jonathan's driver on his way to their house and the nighttime guard heading home. And one of the chula ladies smiled at me.Things are feeling cozy and increasingly friendly.

Though last week when I returned from my walk, the supervisor guard--a creepy guy that waves to me every single time I look up from the kitchen window--came up to me to say that I should be careful because some of the "villagers have dirty minds." His suggestion was that I take his phone number, or better yet, let him accompany me on my walks. At that moment the only thing that seemed worrisome was him. I mentioned this to Vik, who first said "who watches the watchmen, who guards the guards...' and further creeped me out. But then he told Usha, Usha told her driver, her driver told my driver and together they offered to "bash him." Usha said plainly, "no bashing." Instead they just told him not be so "pally" with me.

He stopped waving.

Now he salutes.

See no weevil

Upon our departure for India, I had one image in my mind: long, uninterrupted days of baking bread and playing with Zazie.

Baking works out sometimes. The truth is, things are going to turn out only so well because we have a toaster oven. Still, I keep trying. This morning, however, while sifting ingredients to make buttermilk biscuits, I found many weevils in the flour, microscopic wheat colored worms. At first I thought it was some leftover unprocessed flour or rice grains. Then they started to move. This must be the reason so many cereals and flours in India have warnings that read: transfer product to airtight container to avoid infestation. This was last of the five kilos of flour, not the first: two loaves of bread, yeast rolls, two batches of pizza dough, flour tortillas, three batches of fruit muffins, cream scones, maybe more. Cowboys used to chase their weevils with a shot of vodka. After this morning, I kind of feel like I need a drink.

In the same time that it took to bake up five kilos of flour, something likewise appeared in the belly of my child. She turned into liquid will, pure aggravated humanity. There is no issue too small to make her ignite into flames; no detail too insignificant to push the full force of her being into the pits of hell. Her eyes hollow out and she speaks in tongues. The lights flicker. This morning I thought, could it be the weevils? Were tiny grain grubs sifting through her blood, turning her into the devil-baby at Hull House?

Jane Addams suggested that the devil-baby myth appeared to tame “recalcitrant husbands and fathers.” As if inventing mythical domestic punishments was the only salve to “subdue the fiercenesses of the world” that surrounded powerless mothers and wives against prurient mates. But, Vik always brings his pay envelope home unopened and appears to be tempted only by golden age comic books and diet pepsi.

Because his mother dreamed of strawberries when she was pregnant, the hero of Henry Fielding’s 1742 novel Joseph Andrews, is born with a strawberry shaped birthmark. In the 17th and 18th centuries, maternal imagination, not paternal indiscretions, was believed to be so strong that, when pregnant, a woman’s mind, longings, dreams and imaginations “marked” the child in the womb.

Lately, I have been wondering what my maternity might have bore as I dreamt while pregnant. Maybe I dreamed of a world where shoelaces are always different lengths or where soap melts faster than it can be turned into plastic whale food or where my glass of water is always too big or too small. Perhaps it was a chimera of toys that are always missing the last crucial piece, the phantoms of blocks that just will not stack, or maybe, just maybe, a bogeyman that always picks exactly the wrong shirt. Did my dreams--my maternal hallucinations--mark my child? Is this my punishment for eating nothing but french fries and lemonade for nine months straight? Did I watch too much experimental film? What is going on? Why didn’t anyone warn me? When will it end?

Melaing

It took us four and a half hours to drive 88 miles today (or 142 kilometers if that is easier for you.) We went to Hisar, Haryana to visit three of Vik's paternal aunts, or buajis. The only Hisarian attraction we could identify was the National Research Centre on Equines. We spent the visit eating a massive lunch, talking about how it took four and a half hours to get there and having a nap. Then we drove home.

On the way we were stuck in the middle of a village mela. Mela is Sanskrit for "fair" or "gathering." Our driver translated it as "buffalo contest." I hope you don't have claustrophobia, because thousands of buffalo with glossy, black coats and colorful harnesses met our gaze in every possible direction, cramming the already narrow market lane. Historically, agricultural fairs were spectacles of masculine labor and production. In that spirit, the buffalo herds were led by thousands more buffalo herders, also clamoring for space on the tiny street.

Apparently, last year, our driver's uncle's prizewinning buffalo won the family one lakh of rupees (a bit more than $2000) and 32 kg of milk (about 8 and half gallons). I don't exactly know why it would be a prize to win buffalo milk at a buffalo mela, but I was very impressed with the amount.

On the way Vik photographed eicher red, ford blue, ox blue, and mahindra red tractors. Like tin toys, these slow moving tank-like three wheelers slowly circumnavigate Haryana villages day and night, slowing traffic and leaving a trail of tori flowers and betel leaf packets.

Later, like something out of Borges, there was a long line leading into an impossibly small building, entitled Clearinghouse for Accidental Jobs.

Always the warning sign juggernaut, Zazie was delighted to see the first real stoplight we have seen in all of India.She did not even seemed phased that the red light and two green arrows pointing in opposite directions were all blinking at the same time. At an Indian traffic light, everyone wins.

At our own Auntie Mela, no one could figure out why it took us so long. We were puzzled too, but because we couldn't figure out how we made such good time, considering.

The Funky

Yesterday, we went into Sonipat City to finally get an ATM card from our new Indian bank. After being told that it was not possible (because it was the wrong branch, because it was Saturday, because we just couldn't) and about thirteen phone calls passed between straight-faced administrators, we walked out with an envelope that contained not only our bank card, but also the pin! I think many people would be willing to endure a short 45 minute haggle in exchange for instant debit card and pin access.

Wait.

You mean the card won't be activated until when?

(For a full description of what this looks like, see the blog description of the same experience a few days prior by one of Vik's colleagues. )

Well, I didn't actually expect the process to be either easy or to turn out right, so no disappointment here.

However, taking these characteristically low expectations to another venue had more promising results a bit later in the day.

When we entered Jaweb Habib's Salon we had no idea that we were visiting India's leading hair and beauty franchise. I mean, it looked a little like Supercuts, but only because it was kind of cramped and it managed to be simultaneously under- and over-staffed. Since the day when I went to the fancy salon at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai and had a lady gnaw at my ponytail until it fell lifeless to the ground and then announce she was done, I tend to expect the worst at these places.

Vik's (V) encounter with the guy cutting his hair (GCHH) went something like this:

V: Hi, I need to get my hair cut, but...english, english, english, english, language, english, more english, yada, language, language, words, words, words, yada.

GCHH: Hindi, hindi, hindi, hindi, language, language, more hindi. Trim?

V: Yes.

GCHH proceeded to cut the upper back of V's hair and then continued by just brushing the front into an incredible 80's boufant. Luckily he left the bit in the lower back to give him a slight mullet. Oddly, V doesn't look the least bit worried. As he brings out some deadly pomade, GCHH thinks he must be doing well--even great, but in reality V took his glasses off and is completely blind to the mess.

I chime in and say, Maybe a little shorter in the back?

GCHH: Short? You want the short?

Me: Yes. Then, to Vik: I guess? Right?

V: I have no idea.

GCHH keeps brushing and brushing and trims the mullet off. The pomade comes out again and Vik looks a little like an extra puffy Remington Steele.

GCHH: Bas! (Hindi for Enough!)

V puts on his glasses and starts messing with the top of his hair, trying to get it to lay flat, or go forward or or less backward, or anything less horrible, undoing all GCHH's laborious (and glorious) brushing technique.

GCHH looks scornful and then, slowly opens his eyes. He clearly has had an epiphany. He says, You want the funky?

V looks worried.

I jump in and say, Yes! He wants the funky!

Then for 200 rupees Vik gets the best haircut he has had in five years.

It is called The Funky.

Thus, we are now empowered with a pin number and the tripartite division of men's haircuts, The Trim, The Short, and The Funky.

Oh wait, actually, the pin number looks vaguely like a digital clock that has no power and self-destructs after five attempts.